AuthorTopic: Fallout 3 (Read 290291 times)

So I searched for a Fallout 3 thread, and there was a Fallout thread that talked a bit about the third entry in the series (if you'd call it that), but it hasn't been alive for 8 or 9 months and the board software advised me to start a new thread. And about 3 months ago Bethesda started releasing info about their game, so I believe it's appropriate to start fresh.

The official Fallout 3 website is online now. For those who don't know what Fallout is, most of you know what Oblivion is, and the people who made that game are making the next Fallout game their follow-up. It's to be released in the Fall of '08.

Some things about the game from some article:- Game runs on an evolved version of the Oblivion engine. Third person view has been reworked since the verdict was that the Oblivion version sucked ass.- Game starts with your birth and your mother's death in a vault hospital. This is essentially the character customization part of the game. Your father hands you up to have your DNA analyzed and you get to pick out all your character traits. Your dad takes off his mask to reveal similar traits to the ones you picked.- You grow up in the vault and as you grow you get your first book titled "You're Special" which allows you to choose you baseline stats for each of your 7 primary aptitudes. You'll also get your first weapons and wrist computer (menu) as you get older you'll take tests to determine the initial layout of your skills and traits.- Every aspect of character creation is based on S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. Of your 14 skills you can tag 3 to grow at a faster rate than the rest as you level up.- Battle system is called the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.). The article states. "While you'll certainly be able to tackle enemies in real time using first person shooting, V.A.T.S. lets players pause time and select a target at their leisure". Battle system still uses action points, but once you've used them up you'll still be able to fight targets in real time while they charge back up.- Game is still violent and gory. One of the featured screens is of a guy's head exploding in super gory detail. Apparently all gory deaths in the game will be in slow motion.- More than one way to play the game. Go balls out and kill people, or sneak past situations, or perhaps talk your way out of situations.- Enemies can target you just like you can target them, so you can get injured in very specific points on you body. This is in addition to an all new health/radiation system. This new system has you measuring how radiated certain things (like water) are and how they affect you when you consume them.- Karma system returns- XP based system, most XP comes from quests- Level cap is 20- 9 - 12 possible endings based on your actions in the game- No level scaling like oblivion, you walk into a high level area, you die horribly. - There are NPC's you can hire, but this is not a party based game.- It's to take place in and around the Washington DC area.- To much derision, they've removed called shots to the eyes and groin. No more hip-kicking pig rats in the balls for us.- Super Mutants will play a prominent role in the game.- Liam Neeson will voice the player's father.- Ability to kill children is still being decided.- Player character can be a cannibal- Player character will have to drink water, which is the primary source of radiation in F3.

I'm an old-skool Fallout fan way back from '97, but I'm not really as, eh, conservative about it as the more vocal areas of the fanbase. I was dissatisfied with the writing and mechanics of Oblivion, but I'm tentatively awaiting this game. I'm hoping it's good.

ackblom12

I'm not exactly as puritanical as some members of the fanbase, but I'm fully expecting to be fucking disappointed in this game. It more sounds to me like it would be a great spin off Fallout title, but I have no hope for Bethesda's "ability" to make great NPC personalities and making enough good dialog for a core game. I'm also pretty certain the water drinking aspect will be about as shitty as every other eating/drinking resource management ever made in games.

I also hate them for removing called Groin shots.

Overall, I fully expect it to be an enjoyable game that will be brought down for me by having the Fallout name.

I think I'm better off for not having played either of the first two Fallouts because I can approach this game with a perspective not colored by previous experience. I think conceptually it sounds interesting, and Bethesda has proven that they can make great RPGs, so I'm somewhat excited for it. It's still far enough away at this point that it's not driving me crazy with anticipation, but I'm certainly interested in finding out more details about it. It was certainly well received at E3, if the Game Critics awards are any indication.

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[22:06] Shane: We only had sex once[22:06] Shane: and she was wicked just...lay there

I think I'm better off for not having played either of the first two Fallouts because I can approach this game with a perspective not colored by previous experience.

You're not. What if you play the first two and you like the third less for it? Is that really such a loss? If I haven't played FFVII (and I haven't) should I hold off until I play FFXII for the same reasons? Granted, when you play something like, oh, say, Deus Ex: Invisible War after playing the original, you'll probably be let down considering the removal of RPG elements from the game. But you'd probably be just as nonplussed with the game if you never played the superior predecessor, because it wasn't that great and some of the design decisions in that game were pretty ludicrous (Universal ammo? What?)

Besides, considering Fallout's age, interface and gameplay mechanics, if you enjoyed Oblivion you might get bored with Fallout and enjoy Bethesda's effort even more. I'd say it's worth it just to gain some background on the setting. After all, F3 is going to be a sequel at heart.

I have no hope for Bethesda's "ability" to make great NPC personalities and making enough good dialog for a core game.

To be fair to Bethesda, they have cut down on the number of NPCs from somewhere around 1,500 in Oblivion to around 500 in Fallout 3, and they've at least tried to assure us that they're working on making each one of those NPCs unique. I wasn't thrilled with the faux-Tolkien writing on display in Oblivion, but come on, it's high fantasy. They didn't even have the leeway of Bioware's Forgotten Realms games to write past standard fantasy tropes. I'll give them a shot, at least.

It makes some semblance of sense. They're not working with flavor text anymore, which was just about all groin shots were good for. If you really want to see slow-motion groin destruction, you should play Stranglehold, which comes out this week. It's quite glorious.

Overall, I fully expect it to be an enjoyable game that will be brought down for me by having the Fallout name.

Can't say I agree with this. The Godfather: Part Three wasn't a good movie diminished by comparisons to its predecessors, it was just a bad movie that aspired to be as good as its predecessors. As long as Fallout 3 doesn't try to outdo its pedigree I won't have any problems judging it on its own merits. It's difficult for me to ruin a game for myself like that anyway.

That having been said, having read the 750+ pages of Van Buren documentation and conferred with its authors, I would trade out Bethesda's effort for it in a heartbeat. There was some amazing stuff in there. I'll admit that I did not like Oblivion. I don't like dungeon hacks in general. But most everything Bethesda made before Morrowind was better. Hopefully they can capture some of that again.

Ah, jeez, this is something like my 12th post and I'm already writing reams of text. I do this every time.

azgarth

i've played invisible war before deus ex, and im happy about it, with invisible war, i played a nice, bit too arcade-ish game, that i could enjoy from time to time, with deus ex, i played a magnificent game, i would keep comparing the two would it have gone the other way around, now i can enjoy both, same with the thief series.i'm a huge fan of the elder scrolls series, but with oblivion, they made a big mistake, they wanted to make the market happy, i preferred the style of any of its predecessors, and that's what did them in, for me at least, it was too generic, no real flavour, generic npc,s and they made mannirmaco an altmer? he's supposed to be a lich demigod! and of course the leveled combat, i mean, come on.

these notes make me wish back for the black isle days, baldurs gate, planescape torment, you name it, sure, they had their flaws, but they had a good story, good style.

It had better have Troika-esque critical-success/fail animations. And it had better have a way to finish the game without killing anything. I'm expecting serious dissapointment, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

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One day ends and another begins and we're never none the wiser.

ackblom12

Part of my main concern really is that they keep talking about all the choices you have, but they don't seem to find it important to show this off at all in any of the presentations they've had. After the whole fiasco about all the promises and features Oblivion was supposed to have I'm expecting it to miss a lot of what I want from a new Fallout core series game.

It just seems silly they would have bought Fallout instead of making their own post apocalyptic IP. It's certainly not like they wouldn't have gotten a hype machine surrounding it since they are still Bethesda.

I've never played Fallout 1 or 2. That being said, I'm STILL expecting Fallout 3 to plain suck. I just don't really see Bethesda doing anything, well, GOOD, with the title. That being said, I'll still watch the game grow and I might in the end be pleasantly surprised. I need to get my hands on copies of the originals.

I'm with you on this one, especially since I haven't played a whole lot of Fallout or Fallout 2. I'm guessing the die-hards will be annoyed with F3, though, from what I've been reading about the game. I'm disappointed when the die-hard fans of something don't like the latest installment or iteration of something, because I am a die-hard fan of several things, and I know what it's like.

The Fallout (established) fanbase has been against Bethesda from Day 1, pretty much. But they're not entirely out of their minds. They'd been jerked around by Interplay for years at that point, with the Black Isle version of Fallout 3 being cancelled, then restarted, then cancelled, then restarted again. Tactics had come out and while it wasn't necessarily a bad game, it was more Mad Max than Fallout. There was also the console game, which was perversely bad. Then again, the more vocal Fallout fans are pretty, oh, intense. They take their game and roleplaying pretty damned seriously. Every few months there's another dozen-page long tirade published about how roleplaying games are shams, how nobody gets it right, and how "real choice" could be implemented. They're hardcore gaming conservatives, basically. Some of them really seem to hate Fallout, especially the sequel. They're not fun people, and it's not difficult to understand why Bethesda has ignored them up to this point: Even taking aside the vitriol towards Bethsoft, if you took the amount of people who would play Fallout 3 with no prior knowledge of the franchise based solely on the fact that team Oblivion is behind it, that number would dwarf the amount of people who played the original Fallouts 10 to 1, easily.

So Fallout fans are afraid that Bethesda's going to take the dark, unique world of Fallout, compromise and dilute it and make it easily digestible for the average gamer who would rather level grind than roleplay dialogue or whatever you're supposed to do in an RPG. And frankly, Bethesda can easily afford to do just that. Bethesda isn't a niche developer house like Black Isle, it makes blockbuster games, and the pleasures of Fallout don't make Blockbusters. What's been released so far, namely the prominence of Super Mutants and the "Fat Man mini-nuke launcher", hasn't been encouraging as far as staying faithful to the precedent set by the first two games. And that's not even taking into account the disparaging difference in quality between the writing in Black Isle games (Planescape: Torment, Fallout) and Bethesda games (Morrowind & Oblivion). It's very easy to be skeptical, especially if you consider roleplaying to be important.

ScrambledGregs

Guys, I love the Fallout series and I'm optimistic about Fallout 3. Maybe it's because I don't think Fallout is some holy fucking grail that has to remain a 2D hex based, turn based RPG with the ability to shoot someone in the groin. Do you remember Fallout Tactics?? Pretty meh. Do you remember Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel?! Nothing could be that bad!!

The hardcore Fallout fanbase are going to hate Fallout 3 no matter what because it isn't the exact same thing as Fallout 1 or 2. They are the most close minded fanbase I have ever seen, and they act like they own Fallout, somehow. At this point I'm just glad somebody is making a new Fallout game from the standpoint of being Fallout fans. You can say a lot of things about Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, but that game was NOT developed by fans of the series. Fallout 3 is.

I'm not saying the game couldn't still turn out to be shit. But from what I've seen so far, and from interviews with the developers, I'm optimistic.

The fact of the matter is, releasing a 2-D, isometric game in 2008 would be financial suicide. Blaming Bethesda for changing the gameplay is like saying Nintendo shouldn't have made Ocarina of Time in 3-D. It's just a ridiculous expectation.

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[22:06] Shane: We only had sex once[22:06] Shane: and she was wicked just...lay there

ackblom12

Actually, I wasn't expecting it to stay 2d, I was hoping it would have more of a Silent Storm style POV and gameplay though. The rest of my concerns simply have to do with it being Bethesda, who makes a VERY different style of RPG that I personally can't stand, rather than one of several other RPG developers that I would have LOVED to have make the game. It really does suck that it's very likely that I will not like the huge change in direction that a series that I have loved and regularly played for the last 10 years because Interplay is run by a bunch of jackasses.

Seriously, I'm just hoping that after the game is released I won't be thinking that I'd rather it had just died at 2.

I'd like to see them go clear back to the first in these games for ideas; "Wasteland".

Brian Fargo's reportedly shopping the property around. It'd be pretty funny if they came out with a Wasteland game, as it would be both a sequel and a spiritual successor to the spiritual successor to the original game.

Personally, I think it would be hilarious to have a joke reference to Fallout in whatever sequel to Wasteland gets made; something along the lines of the party stumbling across a Vault sealed up nice and tight with everyone inside suffocated and have a descriptor saying something like "They appear to have been locked in a giant safe in the side of the mountain when the bombs fell. Too bad they forgot that whole pesky breathing thing."

Oh, before anyone gets going about the Vault-Tec solution to atmospheric processing, I know already. It's meant as a joke.

A public version of the Fallout 2 Restoration project has been released. Like the KOTOR2 Restoration Project, it adds in a bunch of stuff that was meant to be in the game but the devs didn't have time to implement. Looks like it could warrant another playthrough of the classic game.

Narr

Holy shit, does anyone else see the prices copies of Arcanum and Planescape: Torment are going for? I mean daaayum

I used to own them in the past but as I seem to do with all my god video game purchases of yesteryear, I have completely lost the hard copies.

I do not feel bad about "pirating" them because I still feel like I technically own the rights to play the game, as I payed for it once upon a time and only my own stupidity kept me from reinstalling it.

On a semi-related tangent, I do not feel bad about pirating games that were never released on American soil.

I still find it kind of funny though that people expected fallout fans to take things gracefully to begin with or that a reasoned argument will somehow make their lot happier. I mean, really, pointing out to someone all the perfectly logical reasons why the sort of product they enjoy will likely never be made again is more like pissing on their open wounds than offering words of comfort or an olive branch.

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the ship has Dr. Pepper but not Mr. Pibb; it's an absolute goddamned travesty

Well, according to Bethesda the trailer they released was in-engine, which looked a lot like those shots so I assumed they were screens. Point being, it's going to look better than whatever the fuck that is.

I could buy that shot maybe coming from the Van Buren version of Fallout 3, but not Bethesda. How could something they've been developing for almost 4 years now end up looking worse than Oblivion, the game they released almost 2 years ago?

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[22:06] Shane: We only had sex once[22:06] Shane: and she was wicked just...lay there

I'm pretty sure that's a zoom in the and the original take was low quality (the pixellation etc.). But my main point with that screenshot was how ridiculous the super mutant looked - he looks like a green duke nukem with ridiculous armor. And a helmet.

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The Oblivion engine wasn't terribly stellar to begin with, really. It had a lot of the same niggling little problems that UE3 had, mainly that the environments were more or less static and everything had a hewn-whole-from-plastic feel to it. They've talked up geometry erosion, but they talked that up with Oblivion during development as well (people still ridicule Bethesda for their claims to "real-time soil erosion") and we're left skeptical.

But yeah, from what's out there to read, most people who saw the extended demo footage commented on the almost steampunk-ish visual design philosophy (especially where the vaults were concerned) and the armor actually looking like medieval armor left over from a slightly less ornate Oblivion. The BoS armor is basically full plate mail.

But yeah, from what's out there to read, most people who saw the extended demo footage commented on the almost steampunk-ish visual design philosophy (especially where the vaults were concerned) and the armor actually looking like medieval armor left over from a slightly less ornate Oblivion. The BoS armor is basically full plate mail.

Well, it always has been hasn't it?

Err, no? Fallout's visual aesthetic (created by the great Leonard Boyarski, who's probably hammering away at Starcraft 2 right now) was retrofuture sci-fi. Lost in Space robots, Buck Rogers rayguns, "aerodynamic" designs ala cadillacs, vacuum tube computers. Circuit boards were bleeding-edge tech at the time of the war. From the sound of it, Fallout 3 seems to be more messes of gears and Goldberg contraptions, which is more steampunk than anything. To be fair to Bethesda, they have nobody nearly as creative as Boyarski working for them, so some regress is to be expected. Still, as different as the gameplay is going to be, it'd be nice if they tried to work in some of the visual themes from the first game, because they were outstanding.

That's not even getting into the Super Mutants. I'm not inclined to say "space orcs" (well, okay, maybe I am), but it's pretty shitty that they didn't at least try and go for the neanderthal Incredible Hulk design of the original.

At least as far back as Fallout Tactics:BoS, and that still used the original engine.

Tactics most definitely did not use the original Fallout engine. It was isometric, but it was had much higher system reqs, with better effects, bigger areas were bigger and multiple levels (climbing ladders and staircases didn't load new areas).

And Tactics, despite having a few BIS people working on it, wasn't very much of a Fallout game. It was a perfectly okay tactical combat game, but the visual design was all wrong (although the robot design could've made it into the original games) and more importantly it was completely lacking in humor, which the original games had in spades, to their credit. The few design details from the aborted second Tactics game, however, sounded pretty good. They learned from their mistakes.

Really, one of the things the first game had over the second is uniformity of visual design. It was 100% consistent in its retro-futureosity, whereas when the Big Three left to found Troika during Fallout 2's development, the game was left in the hands of the rest of BIS, who made a pretty great game, but not the constant eye-candy of the first in the series.

Kid van Pervert's assessment of Fallout Tactics is spot on. It's a widely villified game that doesn't really deserve a lot of the harsh criticism that has been laid at its door once judged on its own merits. It's basically the Fallout setting meets Jagged Alliance but lacks the charm and humor of either franchise, which is a shame, but not really the mortal sin a lot of people make it out to be either.

« Last Edit: 22 Jan 2008, 21:45 by Whipstitch »

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the ship has Dr. Pepper but not Mr. Pibb; it's an absolute goddamned travesty

I think when he said that, he was referring to the Power Armor as being essentially full plate, which it kinda was. The suits looked the same as full plate in BG2 did.

The Mk II model, maybe, but the original power armor looked to add a foot or two to your character's height. It was powered armor made out of some kind of hardened ceramic, not plate mail with wires underneath.

I remember the learning curve in Tactics getting a little ridiculous at times. Like when you find super mutants for the first time (Bethesda looks to have borrowed the "tumor giant" mutants of Tactics, among other things) and find yourself with small weapons against a large amount of enemies who are incredibly accurate with big weapons and have pretty nasty damage resistance to boot. I had to restart a game with a character who could use thrown weapons, since grenades are the only surefire weapons against the brutes when you first run into them.

When you get down to it, Tactics was a Fallout game that deep, deep down inside, was really a Road Warrior game.

I also found it funny how they allowed you to gain deathclaws onto your team right as they become practically obsolete. Speaking of bad visual design, how about those Tactics deathclaws?

Here's the original:Which is a pretty straightforward homage to the Tarrasque illustration from the 2nd edition D&D Monstrous Manual, an image of which I can't find at the moment.

Here's the only pic of the Tactics deathclaw I could find:It's not as cool, as you can see, and far less nerdy.

Deathclaws in Fallout 3 will probably resemble the Trolls from Oblivion.

Narr

I didn't realize this many people hated Bethesda so much. I rather enjoyed all their games I've played. Morrowind's combat was kind of clunky, but they fixed that up with Oblivion and it's a rather solid game to me. They won't have to make their own stat system this time around, so that shouldn't be a problem. (Although I always found the Fallout stats to be rather unintuitive.)

Most people don't seem to trust Bethesda with the Fallout franchise, and they're well justified in being skeptical. The Fallouts were on the complete end of the RPG spectrum from the Elder Scrolls in a lot of fundamental ways. Fallout places a lot of emphasis on dialogue and provides some dialogues only if certain ability requirements are met, while Morrowind and Oblivion have influence minigames and bribes in place of dialogue outside of rumors and quest-critical lines. Fallout had permanent consequences for actions. Kill a child NPC, and your reputation will follow you throughout the game no matter what you do. Kill somebody in Morrowind or Oblivion, and you're slapped with a heavy fine, payment of which will cause the world to forget your actions. Fallout had set character limits. You get an unchangeable set of primary stats and three tag skills, and you'll likely never reach proficiency in most all untagged skills. In Oblivion, character class is essentially meaningless, as any character is free to become proficient in anything and everything, and towards the later parts of the game most characters are more alike than different as stats change with each level. Fallout was more non-linear than Morrowind or Oblivion. While those games offered a staggering number of quests, they were all linear quests, with a single conclusion. Fallout had fewer sidequests, but the main quests and some of the sidequests had multiple paths to completion. You could either kill Killian Darkwater and allow Gizmo free reign over Junktown, or expose Gizmo as a murderous conspirator. You could help the Regulators maintain their grip on the Boneyard or you could retake it by helping the Blades. You could even join the villain's cause, although it would end the game. The tangible benefits of certain choices were better represented in the second game.

That new bit on the Fallout 3 website about the Brotherhood of Steel is pretty good. It gives me some faith in Bethsoft. I hated Oblivion, so I really hope they don't fuck this up.

It looked alright. I don't want to say it's "not Fallout-y enough", but I do hope when all is said and done things aren't all roses. The Fallout tone is such that heroic men and their efforts, rare as they are, aren't usually rewarded in the end. Case in point would be the Vault Dweller. I'm actually expecting that Bethesda will pay direct homage to Fallout 1 and make the ending to Fallout 3 a pyrrhic victory of some sort. They're smart enough to do that, at least. I'm apprehensive of the idea that Bethsoft might oversimplify things. The BoS in the first Fallout was hardly a benevolent organization, and they were barely in 2.

Part of that tone was the foreboding and dread that came from the idea that things were rapidly decaying in the Fallout universe. All the technology still functioning was very old, and the means to maintain the tech was incredibly difficult to come by. Even the self-sustained Vault was crippled by a single computer chip frying. The Brotherhood of Steel was actually sort of a tragic figure, so to speak, in that it seemed like a band-aid on a bullet wound. Not even they could halt the decline of humanity, even if they wanted to. It sort of fed into the Master's plan to "save humanity" by mutating it, though in true Fallout style, even that plan was futile from the beginning.

Of course, that all went out the window with Fallout 2 and the GECKs, which single-handedly solved all those problems.

I've got to agree, the write up didn't exactly fill me with hope. As well as the whole 'brotherhood of steel is a righteous force' thing (Err, they tried to send me to my death in the glow - doesn't seem too righteous to me), the depiction of super mutants as some kind of mindless evil was irritating too. It looks like they've tried to turn them into some kind of cardboard cutout bad guy (daedra?).

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redd1

alot of great information about a wonderful series....though i to am very aprehensive about the third one im probably gonna give it a try to see how good/bad it is.....just hope they dont implement the morrowind style ability leveling